1. Field of the Invention
This invention is in the field of computerized location identifiers, digital and non-digital maps, mapping and navigation applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
In developed countries such as the US, most geographic addresses, at least in settled areas, have traditionally been reported by standard postal addresses such as street addresses. In addition to street addresses, alternative mapping schemes, such as city defined local map grid systems have also been used. These latter schemes tend to be both non-standardized and either proprietary or poorly publicized, which tends to limit their use.
In developing countries, such as India, where geographic address methods (e.g. postal addresses) are not standardized, the process of locating specific geographic addresses is often even more complex and difficult.
In recent years, the Global Positioning System (GPS), of GPS satellites and receivers has simplified the task of determining precise latitude and longitude of geographic locations of interest. Additionally, GPS equipped mobile computerized devices such as smartphones, tablet computers and the like have also proliferated, along with wireless communications methods. As a result, direct reporting of latitude and longitude coordinates has now become a viable alternative to reporting geographic addresses.
Although latitude and longitude can be unambiguously expressed, using such methods to find local street addresses can be inconvenient and is not at all “user friendly”. Particularly when mobile computerized devices are used, users often find the process of entering in lengthy street addresses and/or long latitude and longitude coordinates to be both complex and error prone. This problem tends to severely hinder the usability of prior art computerized mapping and GPS systems.
Prior art in this field includes Natural Area Code or NAC (www.nacgeo.com), which employs base 30 alpha numeric encoding of latitude and longitude to generate global addresses which are shorter than their decimal degree equivalents for equivalent precision. NAC is similar to Beatty, U.S. Pat. No. 7,302,343, assigned to Microsoft Corporation, who taught a method of compact text encoding of latitude and longitude coordinates.
Other work includes the work of Ueda, U.S. Pat. No. 7,903,005, who taught a method of transforming geographic coordinates.
Prior art also includes www.glocode.com which uses an encoding scheme overridden with customized prefixes in certain metro areas.
All these methods suffer from human factors usability issues, however, which render their widespread use, at least for geographic coordinate problems that require human input, rather problematic. Thus improved methods for dealing with geographic coordinate information that are better optimized from a human factors standpoint are needed.